Hi bobperk,
Whether a foam made in China is an issue would really depend on who makes it. Some Chinese products are good and some are not so good.There are several Chinese manufacturers who are CertiPur certified* including http://www.healthcaremattress.com/ (aka http://www.hkfoam.com/index.htm ), http://www.sinomax-usa.com/home.html , and http://www.zinus.com/ . This means that the foams that have been listed for each manufacturer have been tested for harmful chemicals, offgassing and durability through a voluntary industry testing and certification program. This helps to differentiate the worst Chinese manufacturers from the better ones. Of course it’s still important to know the foam densities as this is the biggest part of foam quality and durability and being certified doesn’t mean that the foam is a higher density. With memory foam in particular … I would tend to avoid foams that are not Certipur certified or tested through another means such as Oeko-Tex.
ADMIN NOTE: *Removed 404 link|Archived Footprint: certipur.us/pages/for-industry/find-a-foam-supplier/ & replaced with latest CertiPUR list
King Koil is one of the major manufacturers (Comfort Solutions) that I would avoid because they will not supply the specs to their retailers much less consumers. In the rare cases that they do … then of course I would evaluate their value based on the components in their mattress. Trying to find out more information than they supply will get some “terse” answers about it being “proprietary” and a quick end to the call. Comfort solutions like many major manufacturers is part of the problem in the industry rather than part of the solution.
Gel foams are a newly emerging “category” of foam and there are worse ones and better ones. The versions with “particles” or “beads” are the worst IMO because when you add particulates to memory foam it will not only give a false density (that looks higher than it really is) but it will tend to degrade the foam faster. there’s more information about them in post #26 here.
NOTE ADDED: Post #5 here shows an exchange I had with Boyd which indicates that their foams are CertiPur certified and their latex comes from Radium. They have also reached level 1 certification by the Specialty Sleep Association. All of this together indicates to me that their foams are “safe” and I wouldn’t have a problem with them although I’d still want to know the density of any polyfoam or memory foam they contain.
Hope this helps.
Phoenix